There are many different kinds of audio, visual and audio-visual presentations and activities that people are exposed to every day. These presentations serve as sensory experiences that stimulate our senses and are known to result in biologically based responses that can be measured electronically and mechanically (for example, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance).
A commonly used approach in making measurements for evaluating these presentations is that of interrogation, wherein the television/media viewer and/or Internet user and/or game player is asked to identify himself or herself as a member of the television/media audience or as an Internet user or as a game player. In connection with television viewing, this inquiry is usually done by means of an electronic prompting and data input device (for example, as in a Portable People Meter by Arbitron, Inc.) associated with a monitored receiver in a statistically selected population and monitoring site. The member identification may also include age, sex, and other demographic data. It is common to store both the demographic data and the tuning data associated with each monitored receiver in the statistically selected monitoring site in store-and-forward equipment located within the monitoring site and to subsequently forward these data to a central office computer via a direct call over the public switched telephone network, or via the Internet, on a regular basis. However, these non-biologically based self-report methods of measuring audience response are known to be highly error prone.
In fact, personal logs are subjective resulting in recall biases, home monitoring devices require event-recording by the person and suffer low compliance, while digital monitoring of cable and internet signals cannot identify which household member or members are in the audience nor can they evaluate the level of responsiveness by those members. Other methods of self-report offer valuable data, but are highly error prone and cannot track the moment-to moment responses to media consumption and participation in interactive activities.
In particular, with the development of the internet and its expansion into many everyday activities, people are constantly exposed to interactive media and activities. Nonetheless, the ability to measure and evaluate the user experience, effectiveness, and the usability of these interactive media has been limited. In fact, current methodologies for measuring or evaluating user experience, effectiveness, and usability of websites and other interactive internet and software media has thus far been limited to traditional self-report and eye-tracking on an individual user basis. These prior art techniques involved asking the individual user questions about the experience and evaluating where the user was looking during the interactive activity. Some companies (e.g., NeuroFocus, EmSense) also incorporate EEG in the process and some companies propose to measure cognitive activity (e.g., Eye Tracking, Inc.) from pupillary responses. These companies use these measures in attempts to determine emotional states, such as happiness and to study the effects on implicit memory.
With previous methods known in the art used to analyze responses to still images, phrases, sounds, words or brief productions (i.e., <15 seconds), individuals typically utilize self-report methods or alternatively methods exclusively. These earlier testing methods relied on examining physiological responses in each individual channel; however, to date, no method exists that combines multiple physiological response and self-report responses to calculate a single score that is predictive for a population. Thus, a need in the art exists for a method that is capable of integrating self-report and physiological data and capable of integrating data across multiple physiological channels into a single score.